


the bone fires

by doomed_spectacles



Series: Spooky Omens: 13 Days of Halloween! [7]
Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Angst, Fire, Freeform, Inspired by Poetry, M/M, POV Crowley (Good Omens), Sad, Scene: The Bookshop Fire (Good Omens), Vignette, Wistful
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:40:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27192538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doomed_spectacles/pseuds/doomed_spectacles
Summary: Crowley meditates on the fires he's witnessed throughout his long life.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: Spooky Omens: 13 Days of Halloween! [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1978405
Comments: 6
Kudos: 21
Collections: Racket’s 13 Days of Halloween





	the bone fires

**Author's Note:**

> Racket's 13 days of Halloween, day 7: Bonfire
> 
> And now for something completely different...(spectacles explodes from the mortifying thought of putting these words into the world)

Later, much later, Crowley thinks of the bone fires.

It didn't occur to him then. When he’d flung open the bookshop door and screamed, what filled his senses was Hell. Smoke and paper. Years and ash. Wine and conversations and subtle glances — ending in inferno. Is this the way the world ends?

He’d nurtured a six-thousand-year flame near a hollow heart. Fed it with sly words and little touches. Grew it larger with dramatic gestures and souvenirs until his ribs could barely contain the fire within. Demon. Hollow man. Aziraphale reminded him on the regular — tick, _you’re a demon that’s what you do_ , tock, _you are fallen_ — how could he have known fire had replaced divinity in Crowley’s heart?

The doomsday clock ticked down, down, down. But a fading star still casts light.

Crowley couldn’t stop the flare — couldn’t stem the flow of oxygen that made it flicker. He couldn’t help himself as the world came crashing towards its end. _We’d be godfathers_. Godparents come to bear witness over a creation that wasn't theirs. To watch but never touch. Crowley knew how.

His options snuffed out. One by one. Crowley fanned the flames as his pulse jumped and words ran from his throat.

_How long have we been friends?_

Kindling to the pile. He couldn’t stop.

_We could go off together!_

Till the flames went up, up, up.

— out. The secret hearth he’d kept in his breast went cold with a blast from a firehose. A.Z. Fell & Co. burned. He screamed his throat raw. Tears and soot stained his face. He staggered.

It smelled nothing like the bones had.

It smelled like the end of the world.

Crowley bears witness to conflagrations.

Books always had a certain stench. Whether the humans who piled them and tossed the torch could smell it, he didn't know. The foulness of Säuberung stayed in his nose for years. He'd seen it happen. He smoked a cigarette — tiny fire, take it into himself, the more flames the better — and pretended not to hear the voice over the radio change. The credit wasn’t his to take or Hell’s to give.

He watched flames flicker over forbidden texts like unwanted tongues. He watched and he cataloged the scent as humans burned ideas they didn’t like. It smelled like falling.

Later, on an autumn night wrapped in love, he remembers the bones.

Aziraphale sets newspapers in the grate every day. Words of the day, taken, then burned. Sometimes he leaves the crossword. He marks out the answers he disagrees with and rewrites the clues in pen. Aziraphale knows how to do that. Rewrite truths to suit. He sips tea in their garden and reads. Aziraphale absorbs words into himself, then sets the paper on the grate. Crowley watches, the sharp bone of his elbow touching the angel's, reading the same words ephemeral on his phone.

He won't let Aziraphale light the match.

They drink wine at dusk in a garden of their own making. Rewriting truths to suit.

Crowley's metacarpals wrap around solid shoulders. Aziraphale no longer dresses in an overcoat full of memories. They watch the fire in the pit and they don't talk and Crowley thinks about the bones.

He'd never told anyone but Aziraphale. The banefire’s ghastly joy that resonated — the flames flickered in the same frequency as the one budding inside him. Only someone who’d watched for seasons could understand. His life, their life, is very long.

He watched humans stacking towers of bones growing higher and higher with a mounting mania. Long before Guy and his pennies, Crowley watched bones burn and ashes spread. Every season — _turn_ — the bones stacked and burned. Between the death and the fire were dreams.

Aziraphale had joined him. Stood beside him as the bonfire grew. They bore witness to the seasons — _turn_. Crowley watched, a witness with a flame inside his breast he could never release. When he met Aziraphale's eyes by the light of the bones, he saw a mirror.

They don't burn the bones anymore. Sometimes they still burn words.

Crowley doesn’t have to bear witness.

He wonders where they go. The bones of the dead once sprinkled over the earth to make the harvest new.

He wonders if Aziraphale remembers what it smelled like. He won’t ask. He wonders if Aziraphale knows what it smells like when knowledge is the dry stuff that feeds the flame. When the world is ending and the worst scent is not the failure to save it but the petty chemistry of oxygen and nitrogen and an angel gone to Heaven. A combustible mix of books and love and a candle gone sideways.

He stares into the pit. He watches the flames.

Crowley tightens his grip on fireproof shoulders. Aziraphale wears wool now. He hums a wordless tune and passes the bottle to Crowley. A fading star still casts light. Crowley watches the day burn in a cottage two kilometers from the sea and he holds the bones of the one he loves.

**Author's Note:**

> [The Hollow Men](https://msu.edu/~jungahre/transmedia/the-hollow-men.html)\- lots of imagery lifted directly. Apologies, I can't take the English major out of me if I try.
> 
> Säuberung- refers to the Nazi book burning of the 1930s, not the first and unfortunately not the last.
> 
> Banefire- supposedly the origin of the word bonfire, fire of bones.


End file.
